Romanian-born photographer Dan St. Andrei adopts a philosophical approach to the art of photography. He states: “Life is eventually an eternal attempt to understand your purpose, to build up and mold, to grow and to define yourself … I would like to discover daily reasons to love myself.” His images take on so many different styles and approaches: from the fetishism of his sensual fragments; to the poetic dynamism of his photographs of dancers; to the reflexive and dream-like quality of his dystopic utopia images, which he calls, in a deliberate pun, Mytopia.

If his photo series have any common thread, it’s in depicting life, as Dan St. Andrei himself puts it, as “beautifully imperfect.” The beauty lies in the aesthetic impact, since Dan St. Andrei’s images are not only beautiful but also dreamy, even haunting. The imperfection is revealed in the human emotions and anxieties they reflect, holding a mirror to both what we reveal and what we hide within. As the artist puts it, through the art of photography, he searches “for the meanings and hidden motivations that put our world into motion.”

It’s difficult to imagine a world without fantasy, without dream. This would be a world devoid of possibilities, without a future. Dan St. Andrei captures our dreams and hopes in motion, as they develop, both literally from the camera as well as figuratively in our minds. He states: “There are moments when we ask ourselves about our purpose in life, about its meaning and our motivations. There are moments when we ask questions about life, as it is or as we imagine it to be.” The gap between reality and dream is not unbridgeable. It’s often connected, in fact, by art and our imaginations: “There are moments when we allow our imaginations to roam free; in which we allow ourselves to dream.”

Dan St. Andrei captures the dreamer in each of us, whether we’re artists or not. After all, it’s our dreams that make more bearable our imperfect reality; that help us change it for the better; that give us hope and a sense of drive and direction in life. Without these aesthetic dreams, we risk getting bogged down in the routines and responsibilities of daily life. The dreamer in us, the artist explains, “lives through these moments” when life’s “imperfection becomes beautiful.” This may be only our personal vision–a fantasy–or what, if we follow our dreams, we make happen in real life.

There is also a sense of nostalgia in Dan St. Andrei’s images, as he suggests bygone eras. He does this without melancholia however, even adding a ludic touch, as in the fashion series below, photographed by Dan St. Andrei and created with the help of the talented stylist, Alin Galatescu.

Andrei Octav Doicescu aptly stated: “The present disintegrates, first in history, then in nostalgia.” Nostalgia is an acute, often painful, awareness of an irretrievably lost past that we still long for in the present. But Dan St. Andrei shows us the past doesn’t have to evoke sadness. The past can reappear in our present as a playful celebration of previous epochs, in our imaginations, in art and of course in history.

Like a Proustian search for lost time in pictorial form–a search for lost love, for impossibly perfect social structures, for the (unattainable) fulfillment of our sensual and sexual desires–Dan St. Andrei’s photography captures the peregrinations of our search for meaning in a life deprived of certainties. You can view his portfolio on his website, http://danandrei.com/.

World-renowned dance photographer Richard Calmes captures the elegance and poise of dancers in his breath-taking images. His new photography albums, Dance Magic and Water Dance, will make any art lover’s Christmas dreams come true. Dance Magic is mysterious, dramatic and captivating. Water Dance flows with energy and radiates beauty.It will be tough to choose between them. You can see sample images from both albums on Richard Calmes’ website, http://richardcalmes.com/. Happy Holidays!

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

Christmas Is Coming!

What better gift than page after page of beautiful dancers caught at the peak of their expression? Your holiday shopping was never easier! Two books are available: DANCE MAGIC and the new WATER DANCE. Stunning images will inspire everyone from dance students to those who simply love dance or those who love photography. Editions for every budget!

Creative Photo Sessions this YearIt’s been quite a year for experimenting with both new lighting techniques and unusual shoot locations. From a classic car graveyard to a fabulous town center fountain, my dancers always give me more than I expect. See for yourself!

Click on a thumbnail to see the gallery

About Richard Calmes Photography

Richard is available for photographing live dance events, publicity work, and studio work. His goal is not simply to photograph but to create art. Creativity and new ideas are always the priority. Please call us today to discuss any needs, or any wonderful ideas, you might have.

I just returned from a book launch in Romania and was very impressed with the artists I had the pleasure of meeting in person and collaborating with. I have posted earlier articles about two impressive Romanian photographers of international stature: Nicolae Cosniceru and Dan St. Andrei. Today I’d like to present Claudiu Ciprian Popa, a young photographer (and Director of Photography) who impresses both through his versatility–he has a double formation in photography and film–and through his talent. It’s not an accident that Claudiu Ciprian Popa’s style resembles in some respects Nicolae Cosniceru’s, his former mentor and now colleague at fotofactory.ro. There’s a noticeable similarity in the manner in which the two photographers approach the public through a striking visual impact of juxtapositions, as in the photo below of a young woman painted in black.

Claudiu Popa, however, retains his own unique style and a more lyrical approach to photography, as evidenced by the series Firefly Dreaming (of the model that goes by the name Laura Firefly), which reveals a metamorphosis of a young woman into a vibrant and seductive sensual being.

A talented Director of Photography, Claudiu Ciprian Popa has also collaborated with Barna Nemethi (whom I’ve written about earlier, on litkicks.com) on an artistic commercial for Encyclopedia Britannica. This commercial offers not only an aesthetically interesting presentation of its main theme–books–but also a philosophical reflection about time. Through rapidly moving images, it traces the transformations in our lives which fundamentally change us while also pointing to some stability or foundations, provided by our upbringing and culture.

Recently, Claudiu collaborated with Curtea Veche Publishing on a book trailer for my novel, Velvet Totalitarianism, translated into Romanian by Mihnea Gafita as Intre Doua Lumi. I was fortunate enough to participate in making this short film and to meet the talented young actors, some of whom are already stars on Romanian TV shows. Although we only had a few days to make the book trailer, Claudiu managed to recreate the introductory scene of the novel (in a short skit) as well to capture the novel’s overall mood (in the later, dreamy sequence).

This short film marks not only a new step in Claudiu Ciprian Popa’s career, but also a relatively new direction in publishing: namely, that of launching books through multimedia publicity campaigns that include book trailers and music videos. For more information about Claudiu Ciprian Popa’s photography, see http://fotofactory.ro/.

The photography of Jeanloup Sieff epitomizes class, sensuality and elegance. Born in Paris of parents of Polish origin, Sieff’s interest in photography began very early, at the age of 14, when he received a camera as a birthday gift. He quickly developed a knack for photographing women, which would continue to be a favorite subject. Sieff studied at the Vaugirard School of Photography in Paris and the Vevey School in Switzerland. In 1956, he started shooting fashion photography, developing a signature style in capturing women’s beauty with classic elegance . His black and white images, where shadows seem to emphasize rather than hide fluid curves, offer voyeuristic peeks into women’s sensuality as well as dramatic hints of their personalities.

Very popular with the American market, Sieff moved to New York during the 1960’s, where he worked for the top fashion magazines, including Esquire, Glamour and Vogue. He’s best known, however, for his captivating images of celebrities, including Jane Birkin, Alfred Hitchcock and Yves Montand. In the video that features his photography and the song Je t’aime moi nonplus, performed in a sizzling duet by Jane Birkin and her lover Serge Gainsbourg, the video artist Elia Iglesias captures Sieff’s intoxicating mixture of eroticisism and elegance.

Sieff won many hearts and several prestigious awards for his images, including the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in Paris (1981) and the Grand Prix National de la Photographie (1992). He is the blueprint and inspiration for postromantic photographers today, whose works you can view on our website http://postromanticism.com/

Majeed Benteeha is an Iranian-born photographer, poet and aspiring film producer. Moving back and forth between Tehran and New York City, he simultaneously combines and clashes both worlds, in a spectacular mix that challenges cultural assumptions on both fronts. His images often feature veiled women posing nude in an iconic fashion that seems more sacred than profane.

Benteenha’s strikingly original photography violates religious orthodoxies–about feminine modesty, about the religious and social connotations of the veil–only to show us another way to respect women and all that they represent: love, maternity, sensuality, desire, intelligence.

His images are simple, beautiful, erotic and dramatic. They include symbols associated with the Muslim faith, but also seem very European in many respects. Perhaps unwittingly, Beenteha’s photography alludes to works like L’Erotisme, by the French anthropologist and philosopher Georges Bataille, which presents the sacred as inextricably related to the profane: not just for Muslim societies, but for all cultures in general. Bataille famously states:

“The essence of morality is a questioning about morality and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.”

It seems that is precisely what Beenteha’s artistic short film below underscores, in its mirroring and contrast between a universal modernity and Muslim tradition; between light and dark; between masculine and feminine; between tenderness and predation; between desire and contempt.

Michael Parkes is a master of contemporary magical realism in art. Parkes is a painter, lithographer and sculptor of international repute. In literature, magical realism is associated with the works of Nobel-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose novels One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) play with myth and fantasy in their representations of reality. The critic Matthew Strecher defines magical realism as “what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.” In Marquez’s fiction, the depiction of everyday human lives takes on allegorical, and even mythic, proportions. Trespassing the boundaries between reality and imagination, magical realism taps into myth and fantasy to offer a deeper version of reality. So does the art of Michael Parkes.

Born in the state of Missouri and a graduate of University of Kansas, Michael and his wife travelled all over the world, including to Europe and Asia, where they found a wealth of artistic inspiration. In an interview, Michael states that he’s always had “two loves in [his] life… art and philosophy.” An avid reader of Greek and Roman mythology as well as Eastern philosophy, Michael integrates mythical motifs into his art, similarly to the legendary American painter and illustrator, Maxfield Parrish.

In the lithograph above, called Angel Affair, Parkes harmoniously combines the fantasy of a seductive angel with elements of a Greek goddess and the realism of a man dressed in a business suit. Angel Affair depicts an escape from the mundane reality of work through the promise of a pleasure with no sacrifice: a sensuality that retains its innocence. What may be impossible in real life, becomes possible in the world of of magical realism.

In his magnificent sculptures, Michael Parkes often relies upon characters from Greek and Egyptian mythology to represent not only the unique blend of magic, faith and supernatural explanations of reality that ancient cultures provided, but also the complementarity between masculine and feminine principles. In every domain–drawing, painting, sculpture and lithography–Michael Parkes’ magical realism unites the artistry of life-like representations with ancient cultural symbols that feed our imaginations and offer us an enriching escape into the world of fantasy.

French photographer Frédéric Bourret offers a peek into mysterious, and perhaps unknowable, sides of us. His black and white images are hidden glimpses into an intimacy which is subtle, and only hints at the sexual, reminiscent in their perspective of Degas’s voyeuristic representations of dancers. Bourret often depicts feminine figures in shadows, or looking out the window, or mirroring each other, in a spectacular specularity that makes them both viewer and viewed. Inside and outside meet in this act of self-consciousness, reflected (quite literally) in the image below:

The photographer also depicts young women looking out the window, glimpsing at the city life which remains a mystery to them, as it is for the viewers. And here the themes of his intimate series à découvert mirror the motifs of his urban scenes, in his photographs of Paris and New York, a city where the artist has spent five years. Bourret’s skyscrapers, streets and secret corners all retain a touch of mystery despite the crisp clarity and polish of the images. The play of light and shadows, their impeccable artistry, and a furtive peek at objects and subjects partially hidden from view, all give the artistic photography of Frédéric Bourret an aura of intimate specularity. You can see more of Frédéric’s à Découvert images on the link http://www.fredericbourret.com/serie-a-decouvert.

Philippe Pache was born in 1961 in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was educated at the School of Applied Arts of Vevey. Since 1982 he has held solo and group exhibits in galleries and museums all over the world, including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris and the Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.

For centuries soft shadows in painting expressed mood, emotion and intimacy at least as much as color can. Da Vinci used chiaroscuro to convey the ambiguity of human expression; Caravaggio to highlight the drama and tumult of life; Vermeer to hint at blooming youth and the inner world of thoughts and emotions; La Tour to suggest simple faith and pensiveness.

The Swiss photographer Philippe Pache (http://www.philippepache.com/) relies upon this time-tested technique in painting to bring life, drama and, above all, reverie and contemplation to artistic photography. His nudes exude beauty and tranquility. They are exquisitely posed yet look completely natural. The focus of his images is on how each gesture and expression—the body itself—reveals a rich inner world of thoughts and feelings. The interplay of light and shadow not only highlights the depth of human subjectivity, but also marks the fluid boundaries between humanity and nature. Some of his portraits, though always beautiful, are facial landscapes of light, contour and shadow.

They gleam with the insentience of the mountains, sea and land that sometimes surround them; they become one, interchangeable with their magnificent natural settings. The beauty of femininity captured by Pache goes beyond realistic visual representation. It is the landscape of haunting and delicate dreams. Sometimes, as in the photograph called Cecilia, below, there’s no clear distinction between dreamer and dream. The beautiful young woman, bathed in fiery reds, sleeps peacefully as she, herself, is depicted as a figment of our imaginations, as a dream. Recognizably beautiful yet also indistinct, she floats above the dark shadows and red sheets that envelop her like a vapor.

Dreams are often vague and fragmentary. When we wake up, we rarely remember the whole “picture”: just those frames that broke through the veil of sleep and rose to the surface of our consciousness. Since we often dream about our deepest fears or most poignant desires, the fragmentary, partial nature of our dreams is perhaps nature’s way to protect us from ourselves: from what we either pursue or try to escape most in life. In Joined Hands, the photograph below, Pache once again captures both dreamer and dream. This image reveals an angelic young woman dressed in white, with her hands joined in quiet resignation or fervid prayer: we’ll never know which, since in Pache’s postromantic reveries, the dreamer remains as partial and mysterious as her dreams.

Recently, I ran across the aesthetic videos of the talented Ukranian artist and director, Dima Bondarenko. Like many people who don’t cook well, I sometimes watch cooking shows: partly for inspiration but mostly to admire those who can. I’ve seen many artistic videos that present food as the mouth-watering, rich sensory experience that it should be. However, nothing I’ve seen so far compares to the the stunning tabletop artistic videos of Dima Bondarenko.

Bondarenko takes deliciousness to a whole new level, presenting food as as an amazing aesthetic experience. His videos are in some respects reminiscent of the classical traditions of Hedonism (which, unfortunately, we’ve reduced in modern connotations to wanton sex) and Epicureanism (that we’ve reduced to luxurious and excessive tastes or habits, particularly in food). Under Bondarenko’s masterful touch, Hedonism and Epicureanism regain their richer, classical meanings. Just take a look for yourselves at this sumptuous artistic video:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtn4tENF9XQ]

In the video above, we can almost taste the sliced and diced green apples depicted in vivid color; the blueberries engulfed in the softness of the yogurt; the strawberries falling into the waves of white milk; the peaches sinking softly into the rich cream. The drinks rise, splash, sparkle and foam in a display of color, texture and flow that tantalizes and stimulates all of our senses. Each beat of the music chosen by the director fits with the movement of the delectable food, making Dima Bondarenko’s artistic video a Hedonistic dream and an Epicurean feast for the senses.

It’s true that Hedonism, associated with the Greek philosopher Democritus (460 B.C. – 370 B.C.), placed emphasis upon pleasure–particularly sensual pleasure–as the highest intrinsic good. But the rich philosophical tradition of Hedonism became broader than this goal and compatible with other-regarding ethical norms. The Cyrenaics, for instance, an ultra-Hedonist school supposedly founded by Aristippus of Cyrene (460 B.C.-370 B.C), was actually a Socratic school of thought. As such, it placed emphasis not only upon pleasure, but also upon altruism and social obligations. With the Cyrenaics, Hedonism came to be seen not as the excess or indulgence we associate it with today, but as the art of enjoyment in moderation, to maximize pleasure by avoiding pain. No binges, no excess: just savoring every delicious bite of food; tasting each of your lover’s kisses, to better enjoy the experience, without either feeling or causing pain.

Nowadays, we usually associate enjoying food with Epicureanism rather than Hedonism. For some reason, we tend to view Hedonism more in terms of sex and sensuality and Epicureanism more in terms of food and drink. In fact, in Greek culture, Epicurianism eventually displaced Hedonism as the philosophy of pleasure. Based upon the teachings of Epicurus (341-270 B.C.), this school of thought argued that true happiness comes from ataraxia: a life of modest, moderate pleasures that give human beings a state of tranquility, understood as the freedom from fear and the absence of pain. In my estimation, this is precisely what Bondarenko’s tabletop artistic videos encourage. Through their masterful visual and musical displays, they somehow enable us to take in the color, the taste, the aroma, the flavor and the feel of each bite of food and of each swallow of drink, without excess, to better enjoy the aesthetic and sensory pleasure of the culinary experience. A message is spelled out in the single word featured in this video, amidst a burst of enticing fruit: live! Live healthy and happy.

Born in Besançon, France, David Graux is a truly cosmopolitan artist. His art evokes Romantic motifs, but is edgy, innovative and postromantic in style. His paintings epitomize the best of both worlds: they are Eastern in inspiration, but have a European flair. Above all, David’s Graux’s art is evocative and poetic. Even the titles he selects– The shadow of the wind, Grazed sigh, The echo of a dream–suggest the last breath of Romanticism as it meets the impenetrable mystery of Symbolism.

As in Symbolist poetry, Graux’s art combines the accessible with the unintelligible. The beautiful nudes are palpably accessible: sensual, classic, in private poses that excite the curiosity, stimulating dream, but not desire. Yet the Oriental symbols—invented by the artist and belonging only to the language of his own imagination–are ungraspable. They touch upon the playful and the abstract, never fading into mere background or ornamentation. On the contrary, they travel the surface of the paintings, functioning as background and foreground alike–as an enveloping atmosphere–to the ethereal nudes.

David Graux’s art, like all forms of poetic expression, is inherently philosophical. It captures the essence of a significant aspect of human existence: the way in which what seems most transparent, accessible, real and temporal is simultaneously illegible, distant and unattainable. His spectacularly beautiful and innovative paintings cross geographical, stylistic and temporary boundaries, aspiring to a universal appeal.